In reality, these lawsuits grow Kingsley’s bank account and the bank accounts of lawyers like him, while harming countless California businesses and providing little benefit to employees.

Consider my story. I started the California Business & Industrial Alliance (CABIA) a little over a year ago, after one of Kingsley’s “lauded” lawyers hit the company I’m president of with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit under the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA).

Our crime? We provided a series of workplace benefits for our employees — among them, a safety bonus and a flexible lunchtime — that were not perfectly documented under California law.

If the state enforced its own labor laws, this “violation” likely would have yielded little more than a corrective conversation about proper documentation.

Instead, a trial attorney seeking to make a quick buck turned it into a PAGA lawsuit that almost crippled our mid-sized manufacturing company.

Kingsley speaks in lofty terms about defending worker rights, but his trial attorney buddies have scored massive paydays over offenses as small as a typo on employees’ paychecks. Is that the kind of profit-seeking behavior he has in mind when he writes of attorney activities that should be “lauded”?

Kingsley himself is one of the state’s most-prolific PAGA filers; if the law is doing so much good for workers, I’d encourage him to share with readers how much he’s received from these lawsuits as compared to the employees.It’s immensely flattering to see that my modest organization has merited a response from a board member of the Consumer Attorneys of California.

I take this as proof that our lawsuit and communications efforts have rattled Kingsley and his fellow board members, and they’re concerned that their PAGA profits might be at risk.

They should be concerned. We’re not going away, and we’ll continue to expose bad behavior by lawyers who are more concerned with their own bottom lines than the bottom lines of small business.

— Tom Manzo, Pacoima

The letter writer is founder of California Business & Industrial Alliance.